BMJ vs Facebook

The Daily Mail reports:

The editor of the British Medical Journal has slammed Facebook for ‘censoring’ its report into allegations of malpractice during Pfizer’s Covid vaccine trials.   

Dr Kamran Abbasi accused the social media giant of suppressing ‘fully fact-checked’ journalism and ‘trying to control how people think’. 

A BMJ investigation in November warned that a contractor which ran a number of Pfizer‘s original jab studies may have falsified data and skewed findings. 

Its report was based on dozens of internal documents, photos, audio-recordings, videos and statements from three former employees. 

But when some users shared the journal entry on Facebook, their post was automatically given a ‘missing context’ label. 

This is the danger of elevating fact checkers to some sort of unimpeachable position on issues.

Last election we saw AAP do a fact check I labelled the worst ever. They labelled a statement from Simeon Brown as misleading for saying “When we were in government we increased renewable energy from 65.4 percent to 81.9 percent”. This is despite the fact the MBIE data shows in November 2008 it was 65.4% and in September 2017 it was 81.9%. AAP fact checkers said it was misleading because they decided this increase happened in spit of the Government, not because of it. Atrocious.